I’ve been taking a greater interest in PVP lately now that Sarth 3D is conquered and the 3.1 waiting game begins. PVP as a Disc Priest on the PTR has been quite enjoyable compared to the silliness of some of the things in 3.0.9. Getting hosed automatically by a Ret Paladin or a Rogue is hardly fun. I’m amused by the ignorant rogue who comes into a 3.1 WSG and is surprised his victim doesn’t just fall over dead.

What I’m more amused by is watching so many people whining about the metgame and moaning for the good old days of S3/S4.

As if PVP in BC was ever balanced. Back then, need I remind you, it was the same thing today all over again. Certain classes dominated the field and nobody else could possibly break in. RMP, WLD, etc. Warriors, Rogues, Druids, and Mages. Now it’s Death Knights, Paladins, Rogues, and Hunters. Next Patch it will be something else. Casuals were screwed over. Nobody could really break into the Arena ladder unless they were one of the “fittest” classes and specs. Win-trading was rampant.

The latest news about how unpopular PVP has become is really complete bullshit, to use the vernacular. Doesn’t anybody have the slightest memory of how things were in Season 1 and why Arenas and PVP were so popular? Season 1/2 gear had no rating requirement, was either equivalent to or better than the current PVE gear, and very, very easy to get. All you had to do was, quite literally, lose 10 games a week. It was pathetic. Win-trading was so rampant that everyone could win provided they had the gold. Ghostcrawler, as much as everyone hates him, is right. Season 5 is pretty much the opposite, and Blizzard admitted they truly dropped the ball on Season 5 itemization.

Oh, and Death Knights. Death Knights are evil. Death Knights are awful. They’re OP, yes, but let’s not pretend that these OP classes haven’t existed before. Need I remind you of the Druid? Yes, the Druid took skill, but it was still overpowered. Nobody could come close to the amount of healing, versatility, and offensive capability that a Druid could handle. Remember Mace Stun anyone and the facerolling warriors back in the day?

What the current generation of PVP’ers doesn’t really want to realize is that everything isn’t going their way anymore. The old Druid rerollers have been screwed over. Paladins are now king. For the moment.

To be truthful, Some iterations of Season 5 have been disasters, such as the current tier of PVP gear, but that’s going to change with or very soon after 3.1, and in 3.1.x or 3.2 we’ll probably see a full-on revamp of the BG system and most likely a BG rating system. That’s what I’m really excited about.

3.1 will bring a whole lot more balance to the metagame as Priests, Warlocks, and other classes that have been left out of the cold suddenly gain more power as days go by. Unholy has been nerfed, Blood has been nerfed, and Death Knights are finally getting under control. Of course things were going to go out of whack with an entirely new class, one that hasn’t had the least bit of tempering in real-world conditions until now.

We creep closer to balance every day we step closer to the new Patch. The current PVP game might be miserable for some, but the metagame always changes, and I see it only changing for the better. If you stick through with things, step back, relax, and laugh about the whole mess, you might see that there’s a lot of great developments for WoW PVP coming over the horizon.

The issue of torture in WoW has come up on many blogs already, most commonly concerning the quest in Borean Tundra where you have the option of torturing a Mage-Hunter at Amber Ledge in order to save a member of the Kirin Tor. I have seen many arguments on many blogs already, and I must say this is a discussion I’m very interested in.

If moral relativism is going to be our guide, you’re never going to get an answer to this question, and all the debate in the world, despite the noble intentions of the debaters, is completely useless and a waste of time for everyone involved. Debate and discussion are both made for finding out the truth, so if all we do is toss blog comments back and forth polished with a few personal accusations and vague implications concerning one’s political party, we might as all well shut up and leave this to people who actually have the courage to address moral issues sincerely and without a bunch of pent-up anger and emotion.

But I’ve yet to find any blog giving an actual reason for why torture is wrong, or even touching on the actual nature of torture. At most they merely touch on how torture is painful, useless, doesn’t work, etc., all of which they attempt to support with a few token books or studies on the subject, such as Rejali’s Torture and Democracy. Unfortunately, a book from a university professor does not seal the deal on the subject. I haven’t read the book, so I’ve no place to refute its arguments, but I do know the work does not state that torture is useless, only that its results are unreliable and unpredictable, as all humans are and all interrogators and advocates of torture understand as well. In any case, we’re not here to discuss the finer points of the efficacy of torture. We’re discussing its moral nature.

The common moral argument against torture is that it’s evil and painful. Unfortunately, that’s also completely useless. Pain is not a moral argument. Pain is a non-ethical sensation that can be used for both good and evil. That is simply moral relativism, and moral relativism is, like frivolous debate, utterly useless in all forms. Morality is not, in fact, arbitrary. There are a number of reasons for every moral prohibition in any religion, be they societal, legal, provincial, or simply logical. Morality exists and has existed throughout history to give our society some semblance of order and coherence. Without any form of morality a society cannot exist, and without a coherent reason there can be no moral prohibition against anything.

So, what is torture first of all and in what context are we discussing it? Torture, like all words, can be used to describe a number of very different things. Therefore, let’s put things into their proper context: we are discussing the moral validity of torture in a time of war. We are not talking about personal torture or anguish or other things like that. Please keep off the beaten path.

Now then, let us define torture. Torture is simply the application of force on a person to extract something desirable from them. We must all first realize that torture is not so tritely limited to the application of pain, nor is it limited to the gears of war. There are other enemies of the mind that can be just as effective and far less “painful,” upon which the common moral outrage against it breaks down entirely. Pain is not an immoral thing, nor is discomfort, shame, or a thousand other displeasures we experience everyday. In many cases pain is used as a good thing.

Furthermore, exactly how is torture bad in wartime against captured combatants because it causes them pain or discomfort? Is not that the point of war: to cause the pain, discomfort, and ultimately the death or total defeat of our opponents? Do these debaters understand the nature of shooting a high-powered rifle or machine gun at an enemy? Do they somehow imagine that all guns on the battlefield have flags in them like in Looney Toons? That they’re all harmless sticks we wave around for the sake of appearances? Do they not understand the horrible pain and agony inflicted on someone’s body when it is hit by a bullet, and that on the battlefield the only reason we shoot at enemies is to purposefully kill or wound them into submission for cold tactical gain?

Do you not understand what war is?

The gathering of intelligence from an enemy is, it would seem, a more permanent goal than killing on the battlefield, but this isn’t the case either. The battlefield is not limited to an open No Man’s Land of opposing machine gun lines. It exists in interrogation chambers too, as well as diplomatic seats, agencies, and the other war apparatuses of nations. The information gathered by torture or interrogation is not limited to the salvation of the world, as its opponents would like to sarcastically exaggerate. Much like any military skirmish, its value can range from saving one soldier or tipping a front in a side’s favor. As such, interrogation or torture is a gun, something to be used in time of war to gain the upper hand against an enemy. It is not an infallible savior, and no interrogator treats it like one, but it can be an effective tool and so should be used if the practical rewards might be worth it. In the same way, no military commander worth his salt considers blindly firing a gun at an enemy line the only way to win a war. Hardly. A commander keeps his options open and uses the tools available to him.

Mindlessly banning torture everywhere would be like mindlessly banning guns on the battlefield simply because they cause pain.

The other common argument against torture is that it violates the Geneva convention or some other moral standard. Wonderful, except that this matter simply doesn’t apply in Azeroth. The Geneva Convention is a piece of paper signed by a few nations, but it is not a moral code nor something we should follow blindly in the meantime, and it has severe limitations. In today’s battles against un-uniformed combatants, the Geneva Convention falls flat on its face. It was made in a time of established battle lines and Western Nations killing each other so efficiently and openly.

Now then, we have to discuss the actual context of this moral quandary here, otherwise we’d be just blithering about in the dark whining about moral injustices. Exactly what are the Blue Dragonflight attempting to do? Nothing less than the expulsion of all reckless use of magic from Azeroth. In and of itself, that might not be a bad thing, and the Kirin Tor are hardly fighting for the right to use magically Blood Elf-style. The problem is that Blue Dragonflight are completely oblivious to the fact that their efforts in the Nexus are quite literally going to either end the world or rip it to pieces and kill millions of innocents who have nothing to do with Magic. If Malygos wished to end magic’s reckless use, primarily by causing the end of the Kirin Tor, he might attempt to wage war against the Kirin Tor solely or to at least explain his reasoning to the Kirin Tor—who seem half in agreement with him anyway on the matter—before declaring war on all magic users, making a giant hole in the ground with which to blast all magic from Azeroth into the Twisting Nether and attacking the other four Dragonflights for merely opposing him. If there’s any a guilty party in the Nexus War, it’d be Malygos and his kin. There are other, more sensible means of reigning in the reckless use of magic, a noble goal in and of itself that both sides actually agree upon in the general sense. The methods and intents of either side, however, are what determine their moral validity.

If you understand this, you realize that the Kirin Tor and the rest of us adventurers are fighting for our very survival, not some spat of arcane-soaked land in the Borean Tundra. This is a battle of life and death, not a political diatribe of nations. We have no desire to kill Malygos. We don’t want to kill the Aspect of Magic. If anything, it’d be great if we could have access to his wisdom and knowledge, or even as an ally against such vile villains as the Lich King and Yogg-Saron. Unfortunately, we are at an impasse. If we do not stop Malygos, millions of people will die or Azeroth itself will be ruined. We are not, in fact, randomly going in to kill Malygos because we’ve been ordered to. We’re killing Malygos because he’ll kill us sooner or later, the moral or even logical quality of his actions be damned.

Another line of logic against torture is that people take pleasure in it, but that’s a different moral conflict altogether. The bloodlust or innate psychosis of a human being is the matter of a person’s soul and is, quite frankly, irrelevant to the needs of a warring nation or people or even the moral validity of torture itself. If a person enjoys torturing someone, it is not an argument against the actual use of torture, but the extent or intent of that torture. A person who goes overboard, cutting off someone’s toes one by one or what not because he likes blood, is a monster, but that doesn’t give us any moral reason not to pressure a valuable prisoner into giving us information. It only gives us another objection to the misapplication of pain, but we’ve plenty of those already. Anyone who raises this point is simply wasting our time.

If you want to know, I had no moral quandaries in torturing the Mage-Hunter at Amber Ledge, nor did I have any problem with the mercy killings at the Broken Front. There is a limit to the stupidity and emotional frailty of the modern world. My biggest objection to the whole matter was why I simply couldn’t heal them as a Priest with the powers of Elune at my command, but that is a natural idiosyncrasy of an MMORPG. I clicked the button and understood exactly what I was doing and that it was not only the most practical solution, but the right solution. Of course, you must also realize that you don’t have to do these quests at all if your moral conscience objects to them too strongly.

Very few people attempt to understand the military context of any of the quests in WoW or even consider what we are fighting. If you want to make a moral judgment about the actions of a virtual character in a virtual game, at least attempt to consider the nature of the virtual world before you start running around pronouncing doom and hell on someone. If you were fighting a ruthless, amoral power that can raise any corpse left behind into a mindless soldier to be used against your people on the field of battle tomorrow, would you consistently bury your dead in a normal manner in a conspicuous graveyard? No, you’d burn the corpses and scatter the ashes to the wind and make sure that, if you had to leave someone behind on the battlefield, he’d be dead and his corpse would be useless to said enemy.

Let’s stop treating war like some video game and discuss these issues practically, without throwing in any stupid real-world references or epithets at Bush, Gore, Obama, or some other political enemy we all love or hate. And let us stop pretending we adventurers have some form of moral high ground, as anyone who participated in the DEHTA quests, myself included on my Death Knight, is, by these debaters’ standards, a pure, cold-blooded murderer. Explain to me the moral validity of killing trappers with their own traps to save a few bunnies and you might get me to listen to your objections against the Kirin Tor. Otherwise, stop trying to feed your own egotistical desires to be on the moral high ground.

The reason participating in the DEHTA quests isn’t a moral issue is that this is, as they say, a game, and none of the stuff we do in WoW is actually real. Morality is an issue of reality, not games. The quandaries of loot stealers and what not is a far more serious issue than what we’ve been discussing since they deal with real people in the real world.

Lastly, some might object to my arguments by placing the obligatory “would you be okay with raping someone in-game?” question. Let me first say that it is a ridiculous situation that will never come up in the game, if only because it is entirely pointless, making the question entirely pointless as well. But I will answer this question if only to combat real-world moral stupidity and because this addresses a deeper moral question about actions in video games. No, I would not be okay with it simply because there is no point to raping someone besides fulfilling a base, immoral, sexual, and altogether REAL lust.

There are innumerable points to killing something in a game, be it experience, the gathering of materials, or even the mere relieving of stress and pleasure (I kill bunnies when I feel like it), but all those things are, one way or another, virtual desires that, if the person is sane and moral, will never exist in a person’s actions in the real world. Consequently, if someone does have a real desire to kill someone in the real world, and is using virtual killing to assuage and fulfill that desire, that killing does become immoral and problematic, to say the least. But most players in Wow don’t have that quality, and as long as they keep their game desires confined to the game, they have should have no moral worries.

However, what is the point of raping someone in a game? Only to get off on it. Raping something in a game appeals to a real lust in a person’s body, and so it has a number of moral objections to it, most from my evil Christian morality, that the modern moral relativist has no comprehension of. I am no hypocrite when I object to this but don’t object to flinging someone around with Death Field in Knights of the Old Republic II, as long as that person keeps that pleasure confined to its place. Suffice it to say, raping someone in a game is evil because it consistently has real, perverse consequences in a person’s mind in the real world, one way or another, whereas killing in a game, for the most part, does not.

To sum up, torture is a tool, one that can be used for good and evil depending on the methods and intents, like all other tools, and all actions done in a video game can and most oftentimes are neutral if they are done with mental responsibility, i.e., keeping your actions and emotions concerning that game in their proper place. This is the reason why no moral flag comes up in my mind when fighting at Black Mesa or killing Forsaken* in the Howling Fjord. I know where morals lie and what they are.

If you’re going to have any discussion on morality, you’d best know the same.

“We are proud to declare that all WOTLK PVE raid content has now been cleared. This is both a moment of triumph and a cause for concern. The question in all our minds right now is if we could do this, how soon until the rest of the top guilds in the world clear all the raid content that WOTLK has to offer? Did Blizzard miscalculate in the tuning of these encounters? Or is this Blizzard folding under the weight of a large casual player base that demands to be on equal footing with end-game raiders?“

So said the remnants of Nihilum and SK Gaming, who merged to become the Twenty Fifth of November. The actual guild title is TwentyFifthNovember, but such a name hardly rolls off the tongue. Nihilum was a better name, in my opinion.

You know who these are if you keep a small pulse on the WoW Raiding Metagame. Nearly all the world firsts through Black Temple in Burning Crusade went to Nihilum, with SK dominating Sunwell’s progression curve. Happily I’m confident there are people who have never heard of them period. There was a period when I wouldn’t have cared, but now, as Altitis so succinctly stated, I should think it better if people never heard from them again.

I have (or should I say “had?”) respect for the extreme hard-core raiding guild. However, I have also held a doubt as to their actual value in the community. Surely in any human activity there will be people who exceed and surpass the vast majority of those who venture into it–though this has far less to do with ability and more with motivation–and they serve a general purpose of being the paragon for that activity for which others aim. SK/Nihilum have always been very dedicated and exceptional players; for such characteristics some credit and praise is due.

It seems clear now that SK/Nihilum are not exceptional people, as sad as it may seem.

The extreme hardcore have a delirious need to prove themselves to the community. They constantly desire new content to show just how good they are, despite everyone already knowing that already. They suffer from an insecurity we call Pride. Remember how Black Temple sucked because it was rather easy, but Kael’thas was awesome because it was difficult. As was Sunwell. You had to be very good to get into Sunwell. A common slight against Black Temple was “it was a time investment,” not a “skill investment.” How fitting that the self-declared arbiters of good and “skilled” base it around content they’ve already beaten.

Of course, those quotes are all nonsense. All fights in WoW can be beaten in time. Some fights simply require more practice than others, and some guilds are strong in some areas, e.g., healing, that others are not. All fights in WoW are “time investments.” There is nothing in this game that cannot be beaten given enough time put into things. Kael’thas was not “difficult.” Kael’thas strategy was, like all fights, very simple in the theoretical. However, the execution required large amounts of time to get right. The difference in “difficulty” of fights is how much perfection they require. Some fights are aggressively perfectionist, while others are rather lenient. Nevertheless, no guild will ever kill something unless they have the time and energy to do so.

There is nothing “magical” about SK/Nihilum. Their secret lies in time and experience, not in skill. They are quite willing to take off large amounts of time and, according to their own website, “forgo family dinners” in order to get World Firsts. That’s it. They’re willing to put in more time to kill things. Any raiding guild that puts enough time into things will get something down. All Blizzard has done is try to reduce the amount of time needed to do so. TwentyFifthNovember howls at this because it cuts at their false veil of superiority. It wouldn’t do to for people to find out that the “skill” of raiding is all baseline, e.g, stay out of the fire and watch raid announcements, and the only difference between the hardcore and the casual is time and motivation to the learn the dance.

You may notice that very few American guilds take World First kills these days. I can’t remember the last one that did. Why? People make silly arguments about how European or American culture is superior to the other, but they miss the point. WoW is not a terribly skillful game that requires certain character qualities, except the basic ones that apply to all activities: attentiveness, dedication, willingness to listen, teamwork, camaraderie, etc. No, SK/Nihilum have more time than American guilds do because Americans (we can’t forget the Canucks, now can we? ) have a longer workweek and fewer holidays than those east of the Atlantic. The Europeans have more time. Anyone with more time will, in the long run, beat someone at any activity. The pianist that plays for 8 hours a day will always be better than the one that plays for one, even if they have equal talent.

To wit, there is no difference in “skill” between SK/Nihilum and your average guild that only killed Prince in the Burning Crusade. Nihilum had more time. Time and dedication, all of which are nice and wonderful, but they don’t make you superior to any other person. Some people in the world have more responsibilities than you do, and some do not have a society that supports a shorter workweek. The Twenty Fifth of November are just laboring under the delusion that it does, that they deserve more than those pathetically stupid scrubs who never got past Gruul’s.

Of course, that attitude disgusts me, but it shouldn’t. There’s nothing to say about these people anymore. They are, quite simple, irrelevant. They matter no more to the game. They do not, cannot, and will not understand the people who play this game for fun. Falling into, as Lewis said, the “subtlest of all snares,” SK/Nihilum went from playing for fun to playing for playing. No longer having any actual goal behind their actions, they’ve slipped into irrelevance.

We have, of course, said nothing of the fact that SK/Nihilum farmed this content on Beta months before the Expansion actually went live, so this cannot be considered “new” content for them, but their little position is already quaint enough. No need to make it any worse.

We should forget them.

And scream.

And kill bunnies with Shadow magic.

Last night a crapload of stuff happened, and I’m not sure exactly where I am right now. I would swear I was drunk, but I’m afraid I was only subject to the delightful insanity of my mind. I love my mind. It’s so diabolical. *cough* </narcissism> Are you happy now, narcassistic voice? Who’s turn is it next? Psychopath? Okay, he’ll come out tomorrow. The rest of you…shut up.

I mean it now!

Ignore the above paragraph. I was possessed. Or maybe not. Or maybe. Am I confusing you enough? Whee!

Some pictures to demonstrate the insanity that happened in the 3 hours of raiding we did last night:

Yes, those are the Eredar Whores, who are now happily dead. There was some questionable conduct going on shortly before and after this picture was taken, but I don’t have to explain that, do I?

That’s M’uru. Whom we two-shot. I wiped on his unnerfed form for 2 months through the graces of another guild. I’m very grateful for that opportunity, but I wanted to cry when we killed him so easily last night. The fight is such a joke. It’s about as easy as Shade now. Like Kael, I’ll mourn for M’uru. It used to be the culmination of Blizzard’s excellent raid design. However, now he’s just a windchime pinata. *sob*

Still, there was a rather…surprising incident of comedy after the kill. The Fel Conqueror’s Rainments dropped, a, um, *delectable* caster DPS chest. The decision for the Council, after reviewing the statistics and attendance and stuff, came down to a literal roll-off between Cassytha, a Warlock, and myself. Two of the officers were picked to roll. My representative rolled a 4, which confirmed in my eyes my horrendously bad luck.

Until the other representative rolled a 1 for Cassytha.

There was a *slight* commotion on Vent afterwards. Suffice it to say, that roll will go down in history. I’m still convinced it’s all an elaborate ruse designed to rob me of hope. You hear that, Aliina? I’m calling you out, woman!

The next hour and a half we spent wiping on Kil’Jaeden, a fight I never thought I’d see. I recorded the summoning of Kil’Jaeden to etch the moment in my hard drives for all time. It was a great moment, even if the previous two bosses were nerfed and Kil’Jaeden will probably take a few hours of casual attempts to eventually kill. We got here by the grace of God and Blizzard. We’re going to kill Kil’Jaeden if it’s the last thing we do in BC…because it will be.

—

I am, if you’ve followed me over the year, a post-BC raider. I came into WoW in November of 2006 as a wide-eyed Night Elf Druid. It wasn’t until I found out how fun Priests were (specifically those of the Dark and Swirly variety) that I managed to level a character to 70. It took me 6-8 months to do so. A few quests here and there, an instance occasionally with my tightly-knit casual guild.

Eventually, however, I wanted to raid. I watched a video of a nigh perfect kill of pre-nerf Kael and I wanted to raid. So I said my farewells and left my casual guild to find a home for a raiding Shadow Priest.

Now, that wasn’t exactly hard. Raiding Shadow Priests, to say nothing of *good* raiding Shadow Priests, are hard to find. I was not a good raiding Shadow Priest at the time. That soon, however, changed as I got exposed to raids and Shadowpriest.com…which wasn’t the cesspool it is now. It was only becoming it.

Eventually I found a guild on Alexstrasza and raided with them for 8 months. I fit in mostly, but there were some undercurrents I failed to manage or even realize. Eventually, for my part, I got too outspoken for my own good, and got thrown out of the guild based on what was a misunderstanding. Politics. *sigh* Nevertheless, they were a good guild that taught me how to raid. I was delighted to find they successfully cleared through BT and Hyjal over the past few months.

In the meantime, I came to Que Sera Sera through the dubious machinations of Karthis Da Bear, and here I’ve been for the past 6 months.

It’s been a wild ride indeed. A happy ride.

To Wrath and more fun.

I haven’t updated this blog in a while. I must be getting very popular…because that’s what you do when you become an internet celebrity: you get really, REALLY lazy.

Ahem.

Well, what’s been happening in the life of Apathy? In the two months since the last post, I have:

• Killed Illidan with my guild
• Gotten a fabulous new helm from said Illidan
• Become a very infamous troll on Shadowpriest.com <– Life goal achieved!
• Saved the universe
• Killed people on the Beta and learned to hate Ret Paladins in the process.
• Eaten Rice
• Entered the last two months of college.
• Achieved the unofficial status of co-raid-leader in my guild…
• And…something else.

Hmm, it felt like I was writing a resume there. So much embellishment. Never mind! Ignore that!

These last two months people online have learned about how powerful Ret Paladins are. They can rip people to shreds in .5 seconds and heal back to full with impunity. They have a handy little immunity button that only one class can deal with, and have no mana concerns whatsoever. Yes, Ret Paladins are quite overpowered.

Or…were. In the latest Beta build Ret Paladins got nerfed back to earth. Apologies, but heaven isn’t for everyone, and especially not for most of the jerks playing Ret Paladins right now.

How fun! I just love it when classes QQ, especially when they’re Shadow Priests. But Ret Paladins aren’t Shadow Priests, so I can’t go onto a forum and annoy everyone to death about it. I can, however, write a self-important blog post about it for catharsis.

It’s not hard to find QQ about Paladins. Go anywhere to find a pink Justice Friend running around with his head cut off whining about how the world unfair. If you read the linked forum threads you’ll find tons of posts whining vaguely about how evil the nerfs were and how this will break ret paladins again, just like what happened in Patch 2.0.

In the grand tradition of classes, no one seems to even consider the idea that, horror of horrors, Ret Paladins might have needed to be nerfed?

The biggest problem players of any class have is the inability to rationally determine why something was nerfed. Instead of asking what was wrong with the class or why something was changed, people start whining like 3-year-olds and get as huffy as a high-school American teenager! Like, that’s SOOOO wrong. I think they should, like, change that!

A class should not be able to blow every other class out of the water and heal with no interference afterwards without any cost to their mana bar or some other detriment. It’s silly and unbalanced.

Ret Paladins needed to be nerfed. If you’d played on Beta for five seconds, you’d understand why.

And yet, I can deal with overpowered classes. Druids…*cough*…but I cannot deal with a bunch of 3-year-olds mad with power.

The conduct of Ret Paladins during their brief sunspot of godhood was appalling. They were cackling in people’s faces, showing off their advantage at every opportunity, and making the game a nightmare for every other class and spec in existence. It was moronic, they knew it, and they loved it! But did they honestly believe it was going to last? Are they so surprised they got beaten down? They were acting like three year olds.

I want to see Ret Paladins in raids. I want to see their class in BGs and be a force to be reckoned with. But they deserved a nerf. Their own ass-hattery condemened themselves, and I have no pity for a spec that dug its own hole. If you get buffed and become significant, have the self-restraint to be grateful about it. There was no gratitude from Ret Paladins towards Blizzard or anybody else in the matter. There was a bunch of vengeful shouting and fey laughter, coupled with the inane battlecry of “It’s our turn to be OP!” The Paladin community went completely and utterly drunk with power.

Am I to pity the hungover drunk the night after? No. I’ll do what a normal person would do: laugh at him.

And that’s what the burned community of 9 other classes is going to do.

What happened? Why didn’t I post last week? Well, because school started. This threw me off a lot. Four new classes tend to be annoying, especially when one happens to be a completely useless elective Gender and Ethnicity in Business course that makes me want to murder someone every Monday and Wednesday morning. Life isn’t fair. Women and men are different. As if that was hard to figure out. I digress, but it’s fun to digress; now I’m digressing about digressing. Isn’t this fun? Semicolon! </random>

Needless to say, a lot has happened over the past ten days. A bullet list usually solves the problem of summing things up, so here goes:

• I turned twenty years old and I don’t feel any different whatsoever. Don’t say it’s because I can’t drink yet, because I don’t like alcohol in any incarnation.
• I saw M’uru to Phase 2. Expect a kill this week or next week.
• I finally got above 1575 on my 3v3 team and got my S4 bracers. 1600 is my next target. By the way, F– MACE STUN. F– it to hell. That is all.
• My guild finally downed RoS (with several very painful Phase 3 1% wipes) and Mother in one night! One night! Ha! Mother is pathetic, just so you know. Really…really…pathetic. I mean, seriously, she’s a boss? I think Blizzard had some sort of Void Reaver complex in Burning Crusade. Will Tier Shoulders ever be difficult to get?
  
  
• I went with a different guild to finish up BT yesterday and got a Zerg on a stick. I look very badass, to use the vernacular. No, I don’t have a screenshot. Yet.
• Said guild has been farming Illidan for 7 months and never saw a glaive…until tonight. The off-hand dropped. They were happy.
• I started up a BE Frost Mage on a PVP server and have been fiercely leveling her in the past 10 days. She’s now 46, nearly 47, and I expect her to be 70 by mid-September. It’s time to for the stupid people who make me lose BGs in this battlegroup to face my apathetic wrath!

New Apathy Adventures in store this fall. Hopefully I’ll soon have pics of painful practice on Kil’Jaeden himself! Kil’Jaeden is what Illidan should have been…somehow.

F– Mace Stun!

Semicolon!

End of Line.

She requires a minimum of 3 Priests to be possible. Yes. We’re not kidding.

If you have 2 Priests, put your tail between your legs and run away like a little puppy. You can’t do it. It’s not possible.

Why? No, not because you need CoH Priests to heal through the constant 1000 Nature Damage DoT. Not because you need Shadow Priests to keep up the mana of the DPS and get her down before the timer.

No, you need 3 Priests so you Mass Dispel one DoT that comes every 25 seconds or so. (Just so you know, boss timers are absolutely worthless in this fight.) If even one Mass Dispel is off, you’re screwed.

This is called Gas Nova, a nasty Magic debuff that hits for 3000 nature damage and drains 1000 mana every 2 seconds. This means that the 3 Priests must, in Phase 1, be constantly ready to cast Mass Dispel the entire raid instant Felmyst starts casting it. But if that we’re all the fight had to offer, it’d be too easy. No, there’s something called Encapsulate, on a similar CD with Gas Nova, which lifts one person up into the air and deals 3k Arcane damage every second to everyone with 20 yards of the person for 6-8 seconds. While this itself is actually pretty easy to heal through, it completely messes up positioning temporarily. Since Gas Nova is on a very short and arbitrary cooldown, it can come instantly after Encapsulate, when people are running back to their spots. This means that there are times when Mass Dispels start overlapping and people who are supposed to get dispelled don’t.

You cannot control which targets are dispelled in the MD radius. The only way you can guarantee all your targets will be dispelled is if there are 10 or less targets within that little circle. If not, then you’d better watch your raid UI and spam dispel on targets that still have the debuff before they die. Did I mention there is a 1000 nature damage debuff ticking all the time?

That means you need to stack another class: Resto Shaman! If you’ve been in Sunwell for the latter 4 bosses, you know that Resto Shaman basically make or break your raid. If you don’t have at least 4 for Twins, M’uru, KJ, and Felmyst, you’re screwed.

I can see why Blizzard is so focused on making class stacking less and less of a viable option in Wrath. With fights like Felmyst and M’uru (which actually takes a ridiculous amount of skill, DPS, and practice, and is not left up to the RNG), who needs any other kind of healer? Sunwell may be a very nice instance, but some of the requirements to get in the door and past Brutallus are somewhat…arbirtrary.

And yes, I’m in Sunwell, even though I don’t have my T6 4-set bonus and am still wearing my Frozen Shadoweave Robe. Why? It helps to be a good Shadow Priest. Guilds around the server tend to notice that sort of thing. I’ll explain soon enough.

More importantly, I saw the Dark Night, and it was good. However, many of the plot points were rather convoluted. I still don’t understand how the Joker managed to drive a beat-up, vacant school bus out of the wall of a smoking bank onto a busy thoroughfare in downtown Gotham without anybody noticing. From that point on it became rather hard to pity the people of Gotham, who apparently are the most inattentive people on the planet. I’d say at least 70% of their woe is their own, if not more.

Also, why is every skyscraper in Gotham except Wayne Tower abandoned?

Anyway, there’s been so much whining from Shadow Priests about how we suck in the expansion, our DPS isn’t being boosted, and nobody will want us in raids anymore, especially with Ret Paladins providing 60% of 10% of their DPS as mana return to 3 random people in a raid. I mean, that’s just incredible compared to VT. Today, however, Koraa finally posted concerning Shadow Priests and laid the smackdown on all the whiners–ever so politely, I might add:

We’re still in talks about how to consolidate buffs/debuffs between classes. Making VT raidwide is a possibility, but yes it would mean the value of multiple Shadow Priests in a raid is somewhat diminished. In a lot of ways we’re okay with that (you shouldn’t *have* to have multiple specs of one class in a raid), but there are a lot of other side effects we’re not sure about right now.

To be honest, 2.5% still might be too high. In our tests, Shadow Priests were still providing around the same amount of mana to their party (if not more) than before because of their increased damage output. Not to mention the Priest wasn’t going out of mana at all because of Spirit/Improved Spirit Tap. You guys aren’t testing enough .

In retrospect, the methods of “testing” Shadow Priest DPS were always contrived. Exactly how did people think that by using level 75-77 damage numbers and stats you could accurately predict anything at Level 80? Answer: you can’t. Have these “testers” looked at the difference between 65 and 70? You’re gimp. Utterly gimp. You have about half the mana at level 70, to say nothing of actual damage. Koraa’s epic “You guys aren’t testing enough. ” is one of the best Blue posts I’ve ever seen. I’ll leave you all to figure out why.

Now, to address some whiny Beta “feedback.” Warning: there is math and large amounts of caustic sarcasm below.

Posted by Metaphysics:

I think what Blizzard needs to realize is that hardcore players will almost always do superior testing to their in-house groups. That’s the whole point of the beta test. If you ignore the feedback that players are giving about their class then what is the point of the beta test?

Players post their results and calculations and have those results reviewed by hundreds, if not thousands, of other players. Mistakes are quickly found and corrected. I’ve never seen Blizzard post exactly how some of their calculations were made and open themselves up to scrutiny. If you really need to see an example of in-house testing that was grossly off the mark, the easiest thing I can remember is the initial implementation of devastate which massively outdamaged fury/arms specs.

This is the kind of consumer arrogance crap that drives me absolutely nuts. Hardcore players always to superior testing to in-house groups? Where is this postulate coming from? An Elitist mentality and nothing more, a “Blizzard-is-always-wrong-and-I’m-always-right” thought process that has no basis in reality.

Blizzard has in-house testing that is reviewed by very competent people, people who are actually intending to make the game balanced and fun. Hardcore players are among the most ridiculously biased and narrow-minded people on the face of the planet, always very quick to position numbers to benefit their class or thesis the most. The math itself may be very sound, but the interpretation, assumptions, and outcomes differ incredibly.

Math is not rocket science. It is not hard to get these numbers right or review things. You do not need 5000 players on Elitist Jerks to review math before it can be declared sound. 1 or 2 people who know what they’re doing will suffice. Geez, talk about being a know-it-all.

Do want to know what Shadow Priest testing has been? It’s been people taking Level 75-77 values and extrapolating to Level 80. Level 80 is an entirely different ballgame compared to any of the lower levels. Just look at your average 70 and compare him to your average 67. Furthermore, all of these calculations are made in a BC lens. The assumptions don’t take into account the consumable nerf, new scaling, new stat itemization, new encounter design, etc. Math is not everything. It’s funny to watch these Elitist mathematicians obsess over numbers and miss everything else that affects the game.

Posted by Nidaba:

Some basic math:

In Live
Shadow priests cap out at 1650 dps on single-target fights with no movement requirements. At 5%, and assuming absolute perfect mana return, this is 411 Mp5 (which, in practice, never happens … the amazingly high only-seen-it-once result I found was 4.96% … most shadow priests return between 4.78% and 4.82% of their damage as mana … if they’re in a Sunwell guild).

On an amazing Brutallus kill, over (say) 6:00 minutes of fighting, doing world-top-1% shadow priest dps, and doing unreasonably high percentage return, a shadow priest will do approximately 575-595,000 damage, and return 28-29k mana, roughly 400 Mp5.

On a typical Brutallus kill, again over 6:00 minutes, but doing world-top-5% shadow priest dps (1500) and a typical mana return rate (4.80%), a shadow priest would do approximately 540k damage and return 26k mana, or roughly 360 Mp5.

Wrath
Let’s assume a completely whacked-out scaling of 2x damage, so your uber shadow priest of example above is now doing 3300 dps on a boss mob, at level 80, in Naxx v2.0. Note that this is much much higher than shadow priests are expected to scale.

At that rate of dps, and assuming near-perfect return at 1.95% on the new VT, your uber-amazing-world-best shadow priest is going to be returning 322 Mp5 to his or her party.

At your “normal” rates, and assuming “only” 3000 dps (still a 2x scaling factor), your normal shadow priest will be returning (1.85%) 278 Mp5.

Conclusion: unless shadow priests are secretly scaling to more than double their present dps in WotLK, there’s no way the mana return is going to equalize. The math I’ve seen ballparks present-day-shadow-priests, given a typical raid with an ele and resto shaman, a normal spot in caster group but adding a boomkin, the new talents, all new gemming and enchanting and full Sunwell-level gear, at level 80, might break 2200 dps.

So the mana returns that the devs have seen that “seem to be the same” are nothing of the sort. Look closer at your numbers.

[Aside: on our last Brutallus kill, 5:16 long, our best shadow priest did 485,975 damage and returned 23,372 mana to each member of his party. That's 370 Mp5 @ 4.81%. Our other shadow priest did 472,498 damage and returned 22,702 mana to each member of his party. That's 359 Mp5 @ 4.80%. Hard numbers, hard to refute.]

One more thing to consider: if your math includes a shadow priest getting regular, consistent Spirit Tap procs, you need to throw it out right now. Most raiding content in TBC did not contain mobs that a shadow priest could reliably get the killing blow on. Unless you’re planning on making every boss summon level 10 ghouls in WotLK, just so shadow priests can have continual spirit tap, you have to assume zero procs. That lowers the theoretical dps by a huge amount, especially as compared to a leveling build. Remember: with the health of mobs, a shadow priest can effectively chain-pull and Spirit Tap will never drop. Never. 2x the spirit and 50% regen to him or herself is ridiculous, and you can’t balance around it.

(this isn’t to say to ignore the effects of *Improved* Spirit Tap … just Spirit Tap itself. I included IST in the model that gave 2200 dps as a theoretical starting point for SPs in level 80 raiding content)

First off, VT is supposed to be 2.5% at level 80. This completely throws the calculations of this post off. Secondly, there’s this new talent called Improved Spirit Tap that provides us 50% mana regeneration while casting. Vanilla Spirit Tap is not what Blizzard was considering in its calculations. Way to miss that, Nidaba.

If the assumption is a 2% VT, as opposed to a 2.5% VT as stated by Koraa, Shadow Priests will require a 2.5x increase in DPS, not 2.0, in order to reach parity with what we have now. This number is derived from a simple calculation: 100%*.05/.02 = 250%.

So, if Shadow Priests cap out at 1650 (Nidaba nowhere mentions where he/she got this number), a 2.5x scaling factor will mean we’ll be doing 4125 DPS at Level 80. Calculating mana return to the party is simple. Multiply 4125 DPS by .0195, then multiply by 5. This results in 402 MP5. Voila, S-Priests are doing as much mana return as they are now.

Let’s use “normal” levels. Again, we’ve no idea on what basis Nidaba is making these assumptions. These are Sunwell levels of gear and they affect 1-5% of the entire Shadow Priest population. Shadow Priest scaling problems do not exist until Full T6. Sorry.

2.5*1500 = 3750. 3750*.0185 = 69.375. 69.375*5 = 346.87 MP5 to party. This is much *higher* than the stated normal levels of 278 MP5 in Wrath.

Note how ridiculously easy it was for Nadaba, with her bad assumptions and innate negative bias, to completely screw up her math. Note, also, that nobody, despite Metaphysic’s assurance, is pointing this out.

Why? Hard numbers are hard to refute. Except when you’re a whiny emo Shadow Priest surrounded by other whiny emo Shadow Priests who have a vested interest in having bad numbers in order to whine more. Therefore, through no cabal or direct malicious intent of their own, these people will completely accept your numbers as valid despite the glaring miscalculations in them.

Am I supposed to trust Nidaba and her ilk over the people at Blizzard? Hell. No.

Posted by Metaphysic:

As people have said, shadow priests would need to be doing more than double their current damage to be returning the same amount of mana. I understand that you are probably testing an internal build with level 80 raid equipment, but quipping that we aren’t testing enough when we can’t test whatever it is you’re testing is insulting.

So wait, Metaphysic can quip that hardcore, elitist players will always do better in-house testing, but Koraa can’t defend Blizzard’s far better equipped, far more informed in-house testing? I smell hypocrisy, Metaphysic. Quipping about how much better your testing is (when it isn’t) is just fine because you’re an Elitist Hardcore Raider that knows everything. However, the people who make this game just can’t know anything, can they? You are insulting, Metaphysic. Kindly be quiet and go back to actually playing the game.

As for the scaling at level 80, this really isn’t that far-fetched at all. Go back to when you were 69 and remember what happened when you reached level 70. Boom, instantly you have access to excellent patterns,
instances, raids, etc., that allow you to scale tremendously. My GM’s mage went from 500 spell damage to 1100+ spell damage upon going 70, and his crit tripled in the process. Scaling between the penultimate and ultimate levels is not minor: it is massive, a gaping chasm that nobody has yet crossed in Beta.

It’s not that hard to understand how we could scale up to, say, 3200+ DPS. Double your Stats, double your damage. Scaling has nothing to do with it, btw. The average Sunwell Shadow Priest has about 15-600 +damage and 25% haste. Jump the damage to 3200, not including Twisted Faith (at level 77 you can easily get over 800 spirit from greens and blues. Seriously, it’s that stupid.), and what will DPS be? We can only imagine just how volumous Spirit will be at level 80. Suppose it increases to a mere 1000. This number, by the way, comes entirely from my head and nowhere from reality. 1000*.3 = 300 extra spell damage with Twisted Faith. With Improved Spirit tap procc’ing raids it goes up to 1500, which means 500 extra spell damage. Getting to 3000 +damage will not be hard at all at level 80 if by mere fiat you’re getting a +400-500 increase in damage through one talent.

But few people have been able to measure the dramatic impact Twisted Faith and Improved Spirit Tap will be on our damage numbers, and none have taken the impact seriously. Why? All the player testers’ assumptions are based on Sunwell/BC gear, which, in case you didn’t notice, completely ignored Spirit and is a completely inappropriate basis for judging the Level 80 metagme. If at level 77 +800 spirit is the norm, then how exactly are we supposed to judge how it will be at 80? We can’t. I will not be surprised at all if this scaling “magically” happens…because it won’t magically happen.

Also, I just spent the last 3 hours helping a higher-end guild (the one who helped us kill Kael) work on M’uru, and they want me back for future Sunwell raids if they need an S-Priest. I am very pleased with this recent development. I just got the honor of seeing one of the hardest (if not *the* hardest) fights in the Burning Crusade. It was pure awesomeness.

To reiterate, I haven’t died. I’ve just been busy, more than my Apathetic self would like to be.

Many guilds, especially the raiding guilds, are panicking because ZOMG!!! THEIR SHINY PURPLZ R GONNA BE REPLACED IN TEH X-PAC!! As if this wasn’t enough, people are asking what the purpose of raiding if their gear is going to be replaced one year from now? Well, that’s a stupid question. I thought the purpose of raiding, PVP’ing, Arena’ing, questing, and all of WoW’ing in general was…like…to have…….fun.

No, seriously.

I thought raiding was…you know…to have fun with 10/25 other people you like to be around and kill stuff with. Same with PVP and about everything you do in this Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. Heresy! I know, I know, it sounds very ludicrous, but it’s the truth. WoW is a game you’re supposed to have fun in. It shatters your world, doesn’t it?

Do all those new shiny greens in Northrend some how make your Sunwell loot worthless and unworthy of the effort and sacrifice to get it? Only if you let it. You’d think people would take pride in it showing their skill, even if for a brief moment. How many guilds will have the pleasure of seeing Kil’Jaeden dead before their eyes between now and Arthas? Very few indeed. Given that Kil’Jaeden is probably one of the hardest bosses in WoW ever, isn’t that enough? Heck, how is Thori’dal not an achievement throughout the WoW ages? It’ll get replaced just as quickly, and soon you’ll have to buy ammo again, but dang if it isn’t a nice weapon to be proud of.

Also, if you’re raiding just for gear, you’ve got problems. Sure, it’s not bad to raid for gear. I want my T6 helm and Shoulders very much. Truth be told, I want them far more for their looks than stats. Priest T6 is just…cool, and they’re won’t be a set like it again. I want it mainly just to look cool in Shadowform. The stats/bonuses are just nice caveats on the side. If gear is the only thing you want to raid for, you’re never going to be happy in raiding. Ever. If you don’t care about the fights, the learning, the victories, the defeats, and the good times you have with your guild, you’ll never be happy. You’d be better off quitting now and never enduring the pain. Period.

Finally, be very, VERY careful what you wish for. Think of what it would be like if there wasn’t a giant game/gear/class reset. Think of how it would be if we were just playing at Level 60 right now. The game wouldnt’ have changed, class roles would be like they were back then, etc. You’d be bored. Gear resets are what give you an endgame–temporary as it is–in the first place. Without that reset the raiding just keeps going on forever, never a rest, never a new challenge, never new abilities, never improvements, etc. Burning Crusade fixed a ton of raiding/itemization problems, and Wrath looks to do far more than that. If you didn’t have a gear reset, nothing would change, and everything would be stale.

I mean, if you spent the rest of your WoW-life in purples…how would they mean anything at all?